Arizona’s violent border is the busiest gateway for illegal immigration in America, making Arizona Ground Zero for the immigration debate. No state is as hostile to the undocumented, and no city is as unwelcoming as Phoenix.

Yet Phoenix is home to thousands who live in the shadows, where civil rights are neglected and lives are lost. Illegal sheds light on the invisible immigrants who persevere despite kidnappings and drug wars, an ongoing recession, and laws barring them from working, learning, and driving. By profiling these undocumented people, and those — like notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who persecute them, author Terry Greene Sterling courageously reveals the changing face of immigration in America and gives new insight into a divisive national crisis.

Ciudad Juárez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad. Last year 1,607 people were killed — a number that is on pace to increase in 2009.

In Murder City, Charles Bowden — one of the few journalists who has spent extended periods of time in Juárez — has written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city disintegrates. Interweaving stories of its inhabitants — a raped beauty queen, a repentant hitman, a journalist fleeing for his life — with a broader meditation on the town’s descent into anarchy, Bowden reveals how Juárez’s culture of violence will not only worsen, but inevitably spread north.

Heartbreaking, disturbing, and unforgettable, Murder City establishes Bowden as one of our leading writers working at the height of his powers.

The theory of Nuyorganics joins Nuyorican poetry to organic intellectualism. Examining its possibilities, this book questions existing theories of the dominant elite and offers new theories for those who struggle for accurate representation in their academic environments.

It shows the importance of understanding that lived experiences are often undiscovered sources of expertise and untapped resources for both teachers and students in classrooms of higher education. Drawing attention to new ways of thinking, this book is a voice for those who have fought for a rigorous, socially just education to be the primary goal of any academic training.

Beatriz Sánchez-Milligan is shocked when her 14-year-old niece, Celeste, stumbles into her 25th wedding anniversary party. Celeste reveals that her mother, Perla, has died and that she has nowhere else to go. Beatriz immediately takes Celeste in-a decision that troubles her husband, Larry, who remembers that wherever Perla went, trouble followed. He worries his wife is rushing in without having all the facts.

Undaunted, Beatriz begins to plan a quinceañera for Celeste; but the party planning doesn't comfort Celeste, nor does it ease Beatriz's pain. She feels guilty for losing contact with Perla, and that guilt grows deeper when she meets Josie Mendoza, a journalist who reveals that Perla may have been murdered. Beatriz wants to adopt Celeste to make peace with her late sister, but Larry still has concerns. For the first time, their rock solid marriage starts to crumble, and a frightened, young girl is caught in the middle. Somehow Beatriz must find a way to save her family, before the ghosts of her past tear it apart.

Written by two leading scholars, this book provides a detailed analysis of Mexico's political economy. James M. Cypher and Raol Delgado Wise begin with an examination of Mexico's pivotal crisis of the 1980s and the consequent turn toward an export-led economy, later anchored by NAFTA.

They show how Mexico, after abandoning frequently successful past practices of state-led development, disastrously tied its future to an unconditional reliance on foreign corporations to promote an export-led growth strategy. This strategy, they convincingly argue, has resulted in a fragmented economy marked by stagnation, falling wages, informal part-time employment, and massive migration, which define daily life for all but a tiny minority.

"The War for Mexico's West" examines a dramatic, complex episode in the early history of New Spain that stands as an instructive counterpoint to the much more familiar, triumphalist narrative of Spanish daring, resilience and victory embodied in the oft-told tale of the conquest of central Mexico.

As Spaniards consolidated their hold over central Mexico they fanned out in several directions, first entering western Mexico - the future New Galicia - in 1524. A full-fledged expedition of conquest followed several years later.

Among the loosely organized, ethnically and linguistically diverse societies of New Galicia, however, neither the Spaniards' usual stratagems of conquest nor their attempts to settle and impose their institutions met with much success.

An uprising against Spanish rule, today known as the Mixton war, erupted in 1540, attracting thousands of people from many different indigenous communities and bringing Spanish failure in the region into sharp relief.

Set within the context of the complex politics of early New Spain in which such prominent figures as Hernando Cortes, Nuno de Guzman, Pedro de Alvarado, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado and don Antonio de Mendoza vied to fulfill their ambitions in the west and incorporating accounts and testimony reflecting indigenous perspectives, Altman's treatment of the prolonged conquest of New Galicia provides the first full-length account in English of these little-known events and their consequences for Indians and Spaniards.

This book examines the spatial, material, and cultural dimensions of life in eighteenth-century Mexico City, through programs that colonial leaders created to renovate and reshape urban environments.

In doing so, this study reveals various points of conflict and discord over how various social groups defined and shared the public spaces in the city, and understood their place within a wider colonial system. Bailey Glasco, drawing on research from numerous archives in Mexico City, sheds new light on the critical roles that urban planning and renewal played in the social and cultural dynamics of the city, as well as how it anticipated early definitions of modern Mexican identity.

A bestseller when it was published in 1970 at the height of the Mexican-American civil rights movement, Chicano unfolds the fates and fortunes of the Sandoval family, who flee the chaos and poverty of the Mexican Revolution and begin life anew in the United States.

Patriarch Hector Sandoval works the fields and struggles to provide for his family even as he faces discrimination and injustice. Of his children, only Pete Sandoval is able to create a brighter existence, at least for a time. But when Pete's daughter Mariana falls in love with David, an Anglo student, it sets in motion a clash of cultures.

David refuses to marry Mariana, fearing the reaction of his family and friends. Mariana, pregnant with David's child, is trapped between two worlds and shunned by both because of the man she loves. The complications of their relationship speak volumes -- even today -- about the shifting sands of racial politics in America.

In his foreword, award-winning author Rubén Martínez reflects on the historical significance of Chicano's initial publication and explores how cultural perceptions have changed since the story of the Sandoval family first appeared in print.

The first anthology of Chicano poetry in Chicano Renaissance Literature.

LOS CUATRO IS a travesty perpetrated in madness and wishful thinking by four ape-like poets in the heat of their own loneliness and need for an articulate explosion that would rock the boat and make amerika take nooootice.

ape #1 is Lalo Delgado, a paunchy carnal with the fire of an Aztec hero and the soft lilting phrases of Cervantes;

ape #2 is Reymundo "Tigre" Pérez, a finely featured chicano with a razor sharp mind trying to dissect amerika;

ape #3 is a fiction called Juan Valdez, but the real man behind that name is Magdaleno Avila--a brute of a man in frame, but a sensitive soul writing his hurts and hopes hoping that the tide will turn and Uncle Sam might be resuscitated, for sam is very much a dead machine chewing up people just for the sake of it; and

ape #4 is an ex-con, Ricardo Sánchez ... with all the attendent hopes, wishes, needs, and hasty plots that never work for an escape from the mendacious frenetic desmadrazgo that society is ... his plans never work, he still continues being very much a social being.

this book then is the culmination of needs meeting up with resource orchestration building up to that cataclysmic crescendo when the world go ker-plunk and presto there shall blossom forth a new social order-- so some think ... still there will be madness, for it is in the human way of perceiving life that madness must ever be part and parcel of man's way ...

these selections might move you--at least some of you. those of you unmoved might need dynamite to move you, if so, you are already too lost, and we have neither time nor resources to bother with you. to those who welcome the angers, loves, joys, and madnesses in these pages, we merely shrug our shoulders in a very customary fashion and mutter: read on, read on.

let us then see, amerika, if you can stomach the desperation in our voices, if you can read us ojos-abiertos style and objectively take in our words and ideas; if after you have read you still do not make the effort to understand what we say, then perhaps it will be time for amerika to disappear once and for all ... if amerika still persists in demanding that chicanos burn down their barrios and campos before they listen to us, then amerika must be informed that La Raza will never have a watts so that los gringos can have their cheap thrills at our expense ... la verdad es que we shall not burn down our own--for if we burn, it is simply: LOOK OUT, GRINGO, LA RAZA SHALL BURN YOU DOWN-and don't think for a moment that your conscience money is going to assuage us or stop us ... your token positions mean nothing to us ... not a damn thing!

que viva la raza de bronce,

que viva Aztlán ...

libertad, justicia, tierra y dignidad ...

Ricardo Sanchez

Above, Raymundo "Tigre" Perez

Free, Free at Last,

Raymundo (Tigre) Pérez

We don't have a review of Perez' book, Pluma Fronteriza is willing to publish a "Retro Review" of Free, Free at Last by anyone who might have a copy of Perez' classic book. Below is a bio sketch of "Chief" Raymndo "Tigre" Perez from the Raices del Sur blog :

Enotes states: "a collection of verse that largely explores the painful sense of alienation and loneliness resulting from the death of a mother. Although Crazy Gypsy was rushed into production — early editions are full of spelling and grammatical errors — the volume was a commercial and critical success."

Left-side photo courtesy of Karen J. McClintock

From the introduction:

"There is a degree of surrealism in Omar's highly personalized juxtaposition of images. But we can't allow that superficial surrealism to distract us from the deeper reality of the poems." In recent years, however, scholars have asserted that the form and content of Salinas's work are inseparable, arguing that the poetry's distinctive features — economy of expression, syntactical ambiguity, and ingenious placement of symbols — have a specific thematic function.

While some have faulted his verse as ungrammatical and poorly crafted, most have agreed that Salinas succeeds in creating a poetry that simultaneously defines and preserves the Chicano experience within an Anglo-American culture.

Salinas, for his part, has stated that although his poetry contains abstract elements, his work remains grounded in the reality of the human condition, his family history, and his Chicano ancestry." --- Eliezar Risco Lozada and Guillermo Martinez

Who We Are

The Pluma Fronteriza newsletter was founded in 1999 to showcases Chicano(a) and Mexicano(a) writers from the El Paso-Las Cruces-Cd. Juarez region, the largest geographic niche in Chicano Literature.

Libros, Libros

PF later gave birth to Libros, Libros, the most up-to-date list of what is currently being published in Raza literature, inside and outside of El Paso, fiction and non-fiction. Libros, Libros not only lists new books, but gives you small descriptions, recent prize winners, and weblinks.

Pluma Fronteriza Blog

Although our blog is still dedicated to updating you on El Paso's writers, we found this would not give us enough juice for daily blog. So our blog is dedicated to updating you on what's new in Chicano Literature. We throw in bit about Latino writers occasionally. Although most of our focus is on Chicano(a) letters, we welcome news by Latino(a) writers as well. We published reviews, pensamientos, ramblings, interviews, chisme, chistes, and a lot more. We give you lists of NEW BOOKS every month, new books by both Chicanos and Latinos, or on Chicano, Latino, or Latin American topics.

Want to contribute

We accept book reviews, articles, or any of the above. Just contact us. We are currently seeking reviews to Chicano(a) titles published in 1980, 1990, and 2000. Reviews of new books are always accepted and either Chicano(a) or Latino(a) titles.